# Q about the M.T.A.

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/q-about-the-m-t-a/336942>\
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion\
**Created:** [December 23, 2005, 6:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/q-about-the-m-t-a/336942 "2005-12-23T06:03:05Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Runs\_With\_Scissors](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/278dde/32.png) [@Runs\_With\_Scissors](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Runs_With_Scissors)\
**Post date:** [December 23, 2005, 6:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/q-about-the-m-t-a/336942/1 "2005-12-23T06:03:05Z")

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I don’t live in NY and I’ve never visited there.

But I have been to London. I used the Tube exclusively there. I just didn’t seem to make any sense to take a bus anywhere the tube went. Maybe that wasn’t the right thing to do (for one thing, I missed a TON of the city I could have been seeing from a bus…and I never had a sense of how the city is put together because it was like being in a teleporter.) But…the Tube just seemed like it would logically be faster.

Anyway, sightseeing aside, why, in Manhattan for example, would someone take either a bus or the subway? What are the best uses of each?

I hope my question makes sense…

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**Author:** ![iwakura43](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/9de0a6/32.png) [@iwakura43](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iwakura43)\
**Post date:** [December 23, 2005, 6:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/q-about-the-m-t-a/336942/2 "2005-12-23T06:59:47Z")

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For the most part, MTA buses are pretty awful, in that they are the world’s slowest buses. I believe they average about 5 MPH. That said, the subways mainly run uptown/downtown (that is, north/south). If you want to go cross-town (that is, east-west), sometimes it would be a long ways on the subway, but you can take a bus that goes right where you want it to. Be prepared to wait, however, especially when traffic’s heavy.

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**Author:** ![RealityChuck](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/realitychuck/32/195_2.png) [@RealityChuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityChuck)\
**Post date:** [December 23, 2005, 5:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/q-about-the-m-t-a/336942/3 "2005-12-23T17:58:18Z")

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It like that in many cities: it’s much much cheaper to add a bus line than a subway line, so the bus lines to go where subways cannot.